Improving productivity is a challenge, but hopefully the above examples can be instructive and the Law Practice Magazine issue I’ve cited contains many more ideas. Whether planning to make the delivery of limited scope representation as efficient as possible or being better prepared to deal with a large corporate client’s legal bill review auditors, productivity improvements are good for both lawyer and client.

Managing partner Matthew Layton (pictured) added: ‘With this pilot, we are trying to break the dominance of that single metric and allow our teams to think more broadly about where their time is best spent. This may mean investing in time spent developing and applying process improvements to matters, rather than straightforward matter delivery.’

The pilot will not, however, mean that CC’s Middle East lawyers will no longer be recording their time: they will have desktop dashboards showing how much of their time has been spent on different sets of activities, including financial information about the matters they are working on. The firm said this was done in order to ensure the evaluation of the pilot was based on comparable data.

Firstbrook concluded: ‘By running a pilot on this scale, with a large number of data points, associate input and partner and management feedback, we expect to be in a position to draw informed conclusions on the way ahead for the firm.’

Who are the ALSPs?
This is still a developing, fragmented market. We’ve identified five main types of providers and an estimated market size in the table below. In addition to the legal Current use cases Areas of potential growth Law firm Corporation process outsourcing companies and e-discovery service and document review service providers that form the largest segment of the market, we see insourcing and staffing companies and the Big Four accounting and audit firms as large parts of the market. Smaller shares of the total $8.4 billion market are accounted for by law firm-owned affiliates and an emerging set of Managed Legal Service providers.

“You have all these data points which reinforce each other – there are fewer hours-per-lawyer billed than years ago, the growth in lawyer head count is outpacing growth in demand – and you start to see this overcapacity problem for what it is,” says Bruce MacEwen, publisher of Adam Smith, Esq. and a highly regarded legal industry consultant. “And with 110,000 lawyers populating the Am Law 200 firms, that’s about $8.2 billion in essentially disappeared revenue each year.”

How We Got Here
If you look at the chart that shows the balance between lawyer growth, demand growth and productivity over the past several years, you can see the path that the legal industry has been on. Since 2012, as the chart shows, demand growth, though often fluctuating moderately and dipping often into negative territory, stayed pretty reliably in the range between -1% and +1% growth per quarter.

Lawyer growth, on the other hand, remained steady, though moving down from 2% quarterly growth to the 1% range in recent quarters. Still, that means even at the slower pace, the hiring continues even if the client business isn’t there to meet it – which is why productivity, the end result of the interplay of these two factors, has been on a general downward trend over the last several years and in fact, hit historic lows in Q4 2017.

The traditional definition of “productivity” in law firms is seriously messed up. A few days before I sat down to write this piece, Joshua Lenon of Clio made the case much better than I could in a brief tweet storm on Twitter.

This is the phenomenon that was first noticed by the late Princeton economist William Baumol, that’s sometimes referred to Baumol’s Disease or cost disease. It refers to the fact that if workers become much more productive doing some things — and their wage has to be the same in all sectors, then there’s going to be a tendency for the price of the areas in which labor is not becoming productive to rise. That’s why it costs more to go to the theater relative to other things that it did when I was a child. That’s why tuition in colleges has risen. That’s why the cost of mental-health counseling has risen. All kinds of activities where it takes inherently a person one hour to provide a given service and where productivity growth is defeating the point. Productivity growth in education, after all, is a higher ratio of students to teachers — which is exactly the opposite of what we all want for our kids. Those structural changes are going to define our economy.

Responding to that demand, Hogan Lovells on Tuesday announced it hired Leslie Brown from Ogletree Deakins to head the firm’s legal project management team for the Americas. That follows the firm’s hire last month of Stephen Allen, a former director of delivery and quality at DLA Piper, who will now head legal services delivery at Hogan Lovells.

The firm has been implementing legal project management with a pilot program of about 40 attorneys. It is looking to grow its project management staff by at least five employees, Brown said. The practice is part of Hogan Lovells’ strategic plan, and its goal is to become a leader in the area, she said.

“We want to deliver really high quality work in an efficient manner and price that work appropriately so it’s still profitable for the firm,” Brown said.

During his opening address Monday at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel in Chicago, Clio CEO Jack Newton unveiled the “Legal Trends Report,” which delivers benchmark data on subjects like average hourly rates among the company’s users. He shocked many in the audience after revealing that, among Clio’s 150,000 daily active users, lawyers were only billing 28 percent of their available work hours (approximately 2.24 hours of an 8-hour work day). That number, according to Newton, was closer to 22 percent for solo practices.

You may be surprised at the breadth of what KM professionals do. In the early days, around the turn of the century, the focus was mainly on creating precedent and taxonomies and building portals. The KM part of the focus grew to include enterprise search, experience location, expert systems, and collaboration tools. While the KM toolkit grew, so too did the remit of KM professionals. Today, many support alternative fee arrangements, process improvement, and legal project management.

This survey also provides evidence of the growth in KM. This year, almost 90 people from multiple Anglo-law jurisdictions answered the survey, up from about 60 in 2014. We have had an almost equivalent corresponding percentage increase in attendance of the meetings. (For a complete survey write-up, see my Strategic Legal Technology blog.)

Concluding Thoughts: For in-house lawyers, KM can improve efficiency of their own lawyers. And it can avoid paying law firms to do the same work more than once. Law firms can also improve efficiency. Plus firms can use KM to improve their service delivery, perhaps the only sustainable way to differentiate today.

“One of the points that was surprising to me in attending these sessions we had is how few firms used profitability as a metric towards determining partner compensation,” Ian Oxman, vice president of marketing at Aderant, added. “There were several different reasons why they said they didn’t do it. Some simply don’t have clear access to that data. But some said, ‘Well, there’s inherent differences in different practices.’ For example, tax law is inherently more profitable than another form of law. That was a challenge to them.”

The history of improving living standards IS the history of technology. From the plow to the steam engine to electricity to computers, developed countries prosper by adopting new technologies that improve productivity. In that world at large, productivity means OUTPUT PER HOUR, not hours billed.

As these team-level strategies are implemented and gain notoriety, some portion of the fan base will start to identify with general managers rather than players, and not just because of Brad Pitt’s winsome 2011 performance as Billy Beane. (This article doesn’t cover the smart work being done more on the financial and scouting sides of baseball. But those, too, center on the GM, and they’re catching on quickly.) The prevalence of fantasy sports, for example, is evidence that today’s fan is used to viewing the game from a managerial, even business, angle. The public availability of vast reams of data via sites like Brooks Baseball, combined with open online platforms of fan-created content (like Fansided), enable fans to imagine themselves making the decisions that managers and general managers make. Next year’s fan will lament, “I would never have signed him!”

Consider how you define productivity, then focus on getting things done more efficiently so that you can spend more time off. When you are off, I highly encourage you to really be “off” by turning off your work phone. Soak in every smile, every funny look, every tear, every glance and every moment. Work will always be there. But your loved ones will not.

One reason that clients of large law firms want alternative fee arrangements (AFA) is to drive efficiency. The right AFA structure motivates firms to maximize productivity. In AFA World, what does productivity mean and can firms improve it?

OK, OK, your time is limited, and we want to make sure you’re as productive as possible with it, so let’s wrap up with these two points. First, Canada’s productivity lag is of concern to the federal government, and Alberta’s government is pretty serious about ramping up provincial performance too. But … how do we put it diplomatically? Let’s let Sharpe do it. “The key issue is whether government can affect business productivity,” he says. And he’s not convinced that it can. “The government can’t tell business what do to,” he says. At best, governments can only create incentives. Which means, boys and girls? Precisely: it has to be the businesses that take responsibility. That means you.

This year, facing the increasing work demands of rebounding economies and what CEB refers to as the New Work Environment, nearly all of our members are focused, to some extent, on ramping up the productivity of their departments – 84% of general counsel told us a top priority in 2013 would be ensuring that their teams reliably complete their work.

We’ve spent months talking with scores of general counsel and legal department operations heads to uncover why productivity continues to be a challenge, and a common theme has emerged – the usual productivity toolbox isn’t enough anymore…in fact, it may be unexpectedly distracting and derailing in-house counsel–

Example Productivity Distractor #1: Business partnering—unforeseen and falsely urgent problems often reduce Legal productivity by forcing in-house teams to “fight the latest fire” rather than engage in preventive lawyering. To avoid this, many legal departments forge closer relationships with business partners in the hopes of identifying issues before they become problems. Though such efforts are clearly worthy, when done poorly they can actually fuel the tide of legal work, rather than stem it.

In fact, in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don't, it's hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.

You don't have to like the coming era of hyper-measurement, but that doesn't mean it's not here.

The GTD system of being organized (called “Managing Workflow”) can be summarized as follows:
1. Collect inputs;
Inputs includes notes, emails, documents and just about everything else accumulated and unorganized around you.

2. Process inputs
The following graph explains the steps to follow when processing the collected inputs: